Manchester: A tale of two cities by Marnie Riches

A year ago, the first book in my Mancunian-Noir gangland series – Born Bad – was published. After having had bestselling, award-winning success with three George McKenzie novels, set in South East London and Amsterdam, it was the first time I’d allowed my crime fiction to wander north, along the M6, to my hometown and place of birth.  

Born Bad follows the lives and power-struggles of those who lead the city’s underworld: Paddy O’Brien heads up the O’Brien crew on the south side, while Tariq Khan and Jonny Margulies work as a team to run the Boddlington gang in the north. Their business interests encompass drug dealing, prostitution, counterfeiting, illegal gambling and super-club-ownership - the series seems to thrum with a soundtrack of iconic Mancunian music. Above all, it’s a gritty and gripping tale of the lengths that the “haves” will go to in order to protect what they’ve built, and the appalling compromises the “have-nots” will make in a bid to escape their crappy circumstances at home. Set all of the high-stakes action against a northern urban backdrop, where it regularly rains and the sky is permanently an uninspiring shade of grey, and you can understand why it was essential to pepper the story with dark humour. Mancunians are like that, in any case. Poverty pervades the city like dry-rot. It’s officially the UK’s most violent city, but the people have a keen, dry humour. They have to see the funny side of a hard life!

The Cover-Up published just over a week ago and is flying off shelves as quickly as Born Bad did, thankfully. Where Born Bad had a subplot of the women – Sheila O’Brien and Gloria Bell – taking crumbs from the table in a man’s world, we see the two taking over the O’Brien empire, thanks to bullying wife-beater, Paddy’s apparent demise. Imagine that! A battered trophy-wife and an ex-cleaning woman running the south side and battling with a Birmingham crime boss who fancies his chances! In a series with a sizeable and ethnically mixed cast of larger-than-life characters, readers are pleased to see that favourite anti-heroes, Leviticus Bell and Conky McFadden also reappear. The books can be read out of sequence, of course. It doesn’t take long to cotton onto who is doing what to whom. Early reviews are very positive…

What I found really satisfying as a writer, was penning both Born Bad and The Cover-Up as tales of two cities. As you would expect from the criminal underworld, there is a side to Manchester that is unspeakably luxurious and leafy. The big bosses hide behind their electronic gates in my fictitious south Manchester/Cheshire borders village of Bramshott, or in the well-heeled Edwardian splendour of Boddlington Park in the north. Tariq drives a Mercedes CLS. Paddy O’Brien prefers his Bugatti Veyron. Sheila pootles about with sacks full of dirty cash in the back of her Porsche Panamera. But at the other end of the scale, we have the likes of young, single-father, Leviticus Bell. Where support from his mother, Gloria, is lacking, he reluctantly turns to dealing drugs and being muscle for hire, playing one gang off against the other in order to give his terminally ill son the chance of a future. What other opportunities does someone like Lev have to escape the rubbish-strewn sprawl of his tower block on the fictitious council estate of Sweeney Hall? Both rich and poor have some morally dubious choices to make in the books, and their decisions are never easily reached. As a reader, you find yourself as much absorbed by these grey-area moral predicaments as you are by the grey, rain-soaked locations.

I’d encouraged readers who like their gangland thrillers to give this series a try. I am a real Mancunian and I feel certain I’ve painted the UK’s “most violent city” in its true colours. Go on! Dip your toe in Born Bad’s and The Cover-Up’s freezing cold waters! You’re as likely to end up smelling a million dollars as you are to be coated in grime!

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The Cover Up by Marnie Riches (Avon)

Watch your back. Everyone else will be.  How far would you go to protect your empire?  Manchester’s criminal underworld is reeling from the loss of its leader, Paddy O’Brien. In the wake of her husband’s death, Sheila O’Brien takes charge of the city, and for once, she’s doing things her way.  But she hasn’t reckoned with the fearsome Nigel Bancroft, a threat from Birmingham who is determined to conquer Manchester next.  As a power tussle begins, Sheila is determined to keep control of the empire she has won – even if it means she has to die trying…

More information about the author and her books can be found on her website.  You can also follow her on Twitter @Marnie_Riches.

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Moving Target: From Gangland to Thriller

Today’s guest blog is by Dreda Say Mitchell a British novelist, broadcaster, journalist, and freelance education consultant.  Dreda Say Mitchell burst on to the crime fiction scene in 2005 when her debut novel Running Hot won the CWA John Creasey Dagger.  Her second novel, Killer Tune, was voted one of Elle magazine's top ten reads, 2007, and her fifth book, Hit Girls, was voted a top ten book of 2011 by Reviewing the Evidence.  Her novel Geezer Girls' the third book in her Gangland Girl series was a 2014 World Book Night UK choice. 

Everyone in the publishing industry is familiar with the concept of ‘genre’ but it’s something of a flexible friend.  Is ‘Crime And Punishment’ a literary classic or a psychological thriller?  Raymond Chandler started out as a pulp fiction author but is now on the reading list at universities.  You can see the same process now under way with Ruth Rendell and others.  There is one rule you can apply though – if the critics and academia are taking you seriously, you’re not genre.  If, on the other hand, they’re not name-checking you, then you probably are.  So the lines are blurred and often rather unhelpful.  With my new novel ‘Vendetta’, I decided it was time to shift direction somewhat and it proved to be an interesting experience.

My first book ‘Running Hot’ initially fell into the ‘Urban’ category, which critics have apparently decided is a respectable genre.  But the fact that there was also plenty of crime involved meant I was fortunate enough to win the John Creasey Dagger for it.  Subsequently, I began writing books set in East London gangland.  This was a natural development for me as I grew up on an estate in Tower Hamlets and saw and heard more than enough stories to keep the wheels turning.  But for me it was always about more than murder and mayhem.  In our Hampstead orientated society, the lives of people in the poorer parts of our towns and cities go largely unexamined and I wanted to examine them.  Along with the guns and the twists, I wanted them to be about people.

Then I decided, after a couple of years break from writing books, to shift focus again when I

began my new novel ‘Vendetta’.  It seemed to me that I’d exhausted what I wanted to do in East London.  Vendetta falls into the thriller genre, another very flexible format.  I was glad about this on a number of counts.  Firstly, because I’ve been a thriller fan since I was old enough to read.  Secondly, because writing thrillers is a very demanding task for a writer and I know as a thriller-reader just how difficult it is to pull the wool over the eyes of consumers of this kind of fiction.  When I swapped sides from reader to writer, I discovered it’s quite a challenge, a hugely pleasurable one but a challenge none the less.  And finally, I discovered that the thriller format offers just as many opportunities to explore subjects as other genres do.  As I finished my new book, the misadventures of undercover cop Bob Lambert, his life, and loves burst into the headlines.  So closely did some of these headlines match ‘Vendetta’, it could have been part of the book blurb.

Of course, there are basic building blocks, which you ignore at your peril.  A compelling hero is a must, as is a clever and rhythmic plot.  The giants of the genre assemble their stories like Swiss watches.  You need pace - such stories don’t hang around, if they do the reader gets off at the next stop.  But what was interesting for me was not how different writing thrillers were to what I’d done before but how similar.  From ‘Running Hot’ onwards, I’ve been committed to characterisation, plot, and pace because those are the books I like to read and most authors like to write the stories they want to read.  There’s no faking it in fiction, the reader can spot a phoney writer whose heart isn’t in it a mile off.  A lot of literary authors think this sort of fiction is easy and they can turn their hand to it.  They soon get found out.

For now, I’m committed to writing thrillers; I love writing them as much as I love reading them.  Will I swap genre again?  It’s possible.  But one thing for sure, if I ever find myself nominated for the Booker, my hero will still have a gun in his hand…

VENDETTA by Dreda Say Mitchell is out now in paperback and eBook, published by Hodder, £6.99.  For more information visit www.dredasaymitchell.com and follow Dreda on twitter @DredaMitchell